Bobby gave him the backstory, and Guttfriend examined his hands, nodding and tapping his pen on his cheek. Bobby watched the lymph grow in the wells of his cuticles and saw the yellow stains it made on the bandages. His right hand was more inflamed than the left, but the left had more open sores. His wrists looked much too small to be connected to his inflamed hands, and Dr. Guttfriend seemed to express displeasure at the mention of cortisone.
“Cortisone appears to work, but it only undermines the condition in the long run. It makes the outer dehrmis fragile, like onion skin.”
“Well, it has saved my ass.”
“But not enough, as you can see.”
Bobby looked up at the posters of the little kids, going Dutch tra-la-la down a sunny northern European street. “I mean, I don’t know what I would do when the itch comes. It’s like a wave taking me out. It’s so powerful.”
“You’ve tried cod liver oil?”
“Bottles of it.”
“Cutting out coffee?”
“Check.”
“Avoiding nuts and wheat?”
“Like a carnivore.”
“Not scratching?”
“Oh, never,” Bobby said, and he and Guttfriend laughed like old friends.
Finally, Bobby thought, someone who understood. This was the most fun he’d had on this tour. He felt like the two of them were priests talking theology.
“When did you say your hands became unmanageable?”
“Sometime on the third tour.”
“When was that?”
“About a year ago.”
Dr. Guttfriend nodded, and Sarah grabbed Bobby’s shoulder. “Your hands have been like this for a year?” she said. “Bobby, no.”
“You get used to it.”
“That’s crazy, babe.”
Bobby’s world always froze for a second when a girl called him babe for the first time.
“You can’t live like that,” she continued, and looked at Guttfriend. “Please do something.”
He had the strangest feeling, a heat on the left side of his face, the warmth of a fireplace in a ski lodge, rosy and comforting. Sarah was there, lying in front of the flames, wrapped naked in a bearskin rug. She gave him a look.
“I could refer Sarah to a dermatologist,” Guttfriend said. “How long are you in Amsterdam?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Tonight’s our last night, and then I don’t know what’s going to happen.” He turned to her. “I have a plane reservation for tomorrow, but I could change it.”
Sarah nodded ever so slightly and smiled, showing her teeth, her ivory jewels. Bobby thought of tulip fields and his face on an EU passport. His hands pulsed like a go-ahead.
“I could change it,” he said. “Why don’t you give us his name?”
11
DARLO CRAMPED HIMSELF into the small Dutch phone booth, green and covered with KPN logos, holding Joey’s fat phone in his hand while she sat next door in a bar. He felt private in there, free of Joey’s all-seeing gaze. Fucking thing weighs a ton, he thought, and popped the phone against the green handset, making a crack down the middle.
Bob McFadden, the Cox family lawyer, picked up on the fifth ring.
“Why are you calling me in the middle of the night, Darlo?”
McFadden, the old family counsel who’d seen them through Ed Meese and John Ashcroft and two investigations for syndicalism. The guy who’d collected thirty grand in fees for negotiating the Blood Orphans contract and then applied exactly zero pressure to Warners when they dropped the ball.
“Don’t sound too excited.”
“You woke me up,” McFadden said. “How do you want me to sound?”
Fucking McFadden, Darlo thought. On this day, where my dad lands in the clink, you should be up around the clock, hauling legal ass.
“Look, Bob,” he said, “what’s the deal? I’m in fucking Amsterdam and none of my cards work. I can’t access any money.”
“Your dad —”
“I know, I know, Bob.”
“Don’t you want to know how he’s doing?”
“Fuck him. I can’t get my money because of him. Why can’t I, Bob?”
McFadden did that lawyer sigh. “I can’t believe he didn’t tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
“That when the DA froze all his accounts, yours would freeze too.”
“When the DA … Did you know that this was coming?”
He groaned. A bed creaked. “Yeah, Darlo. I did. So did he.”
Static overrode them. Weather shifts over the North Sea. Seagulls over the Arctic. Wasn’t the idea with this thousand-dollar phone that you avoided interference?
“Well, he didn’t tell me.” He kicked the wall. “I can’t believe he’d do this to me. He said the money would be safer tied to his.”
Another lawyer sigh. “In all honesty, Darlo, I don’t know why you would ever have taken that to mean anything.”
That hurt like a paper cut. Implying that his dad took advantage of him. It hurt, Darlo knew, because it was true.
“Yeah, well, then why didn’t you tell me how stupid that was?” he said. “I mean, aren’t you my lawyer too? I mean, like how much have you leached off us and now you can’t help?”
“Darlo,” he said, “I’m not a magician.”
“No, but you are a crooked little fuck.”
Another lawyer sigh.
“Stop with the fucking lawyer sighs. I fucking hate those.”
“Look,” McFadden said. “I know you’re upset. I wish I could help. There’s nothing I can do. But this business with the missing girl —”
“What business?”
“The girl that showed up yesterday at the Encino precinct who said she’d escaped from the house of a man named Jeffrey Brown, who’d been keeping her in a dungeon. She named a number of men as part of a sex-slave ring. Your dad was one of them.”
Darlo felt a gust of sulfurous wind shoot through him. He turned in the booth, fast, as if some noxious ghost had just blown into his ear. A hot ball of memory threw him over, lathered him up, flattened him out.
“Darlo?” McFadden said. “Hello?”
“I’m here.” He ran his hands through his hair. He looked down at his pants. A new spot of urine. He smelled weird all of a sudden. “I can’t even figure out what that means.” Another gust moved through him, a windy metallic shiver. “What does that mean?”
“It means that come tomorrow they comb your dad’s house for real, and if they find anything …”
Darlo felt like he was being lifted up right there in his shoes. Those cops would find signs of a regular Inquisition chamber down there in the catacombs.
“But what about the money, Bob? My money.”
One more lawyer sigh. Echoes of waves cresting in the Bering Sea.
“Nothing I can do right now, Darlo. I’m sorry. Borrow some from your bandmates.”
Darlo hung up. “Yeah, thanks, Bob!” he said. “Real swift.”
Creating a false image of one’s father wasn’t easy. To be the lone crusader for his good name, the defender of the faith, you had to drink the Kool-Aid and even lick the rim. All reason was against you. And look where it’s gotten me, Darlo thought. He imagined the house in Laurel Canyon, knew his dad was somewhere in there, maybe with one of those GPS bracelets around an ankle, celebrating the day he’d made the illustrious list of Those Who Have Been Indicted. This was, to David Cox, an honor.
“What bullshit,” Darlo said, and cracked his knuckles.
And how would his dad commemorate this exciting day, now that he could present himself as a bona fide outlaw? Probably by the pool, his no-longer-indestructible body taking in a fat line of prescription speed, eighteen-year-old nubiles at each corner of his vision like holes in a pool table, though the man wasn’t really much into sex anymore. He just wanted the pussy close, the ass in reach, the wet mouths at the ready to take orders. Viagra was all that kept him up anymore; he often went overboard with the drug, c
omplaining to his son, whose erections were natural and never-ending, about the unique discomfort of the hard-on that wouldn’t die.
“Guess you can get too much of a good thing, eh, Kemo Sabe?” he’d said on a number of occasions. “Guess you can shoot the moon and hit the sun.”
Violence was his thing now. Daddy Cox would pay girls to get hit and tape their screams. Darlo had long wondered when one of these girls was going to turn her scream into a lawsuit. You could hear those screams through the bushes, down the street. How was it that no one had ever complained? How was it that no policemen had ever stopped by to chat?
He went and sat down at the bar next to Joey. The manager smoked a cigarette and looked through her bag for something she couldn’t find.
“That phone is a piece of fucking work,” he said, handing it over.
“Try carrying it around all day,” she said.
Darlo watched Joey wolf her bourbon and make smoke rings. The mohawk had grown too long in front, and blond hay fell into her eyes. Man, he wanted to kiss her. Nausea washed over him like a bore tide. Quicksand trapped him in place.
Darlo had gone through life thinking he was like any other guy. He was like Bobby, but cruder. He was like Bobby, but his dad was in porn. He was like Bobby, but no. He was of this, from this, destined to be this. He was not Bobby. Bobby’s parents were not people who taped the screams of desperate girls who fucked strangers for a living.
And then he snapped out of it. He rolled up on the shore of logistics and plans. Logistics and plans kept him safe.
Keep the band alive. Make the band your focus. Dad is lost.
He came up through the kelp. Logistics. And. Plans.
“Double bourbon,” he said, and lit a cigarette.
Joey quit looking for her lost item. “How’d it go?”
“For shit. I have to fucking call him back later. No funds.”
“I got your back.” Joey smiled, and then her nose wrinkled. “You really smell, babe.”
“I think I pissed on myself a little.” Darlo looked at his pants, shrugged. “You still haven’t told me what Hackney said.” He lit a cigarette. “Spill it.”
“Nothing to spill.”
Darlo didn’t believe her, but he could harbor only one worry at a time, and his father had taken that mooring.
“Can’t even imagine what kind of shit is waiting for me back in the States,” he said. “You think maybe I should move out and find my own place?”
“Yes,” Joey said. “That would be a start.”
“Maybe being too close to the old man is holding me back.”
“I could have told you that.”
“Yeah, well, why didn’t you?”
“Maybe because you worship the ground he walks on?” She made a face. “You’ve been clear that Thou Shalt Speak No Ill of Thy Father.”
Darlo shook his head and gulped his drink. “You know when you get, like, a feeling in your gut that everything is not what it seems? I mean, I don’t mean any mystical shit, I’m not about to get all Shane right now, just an unsettling sense that shit is off? In your life? A lot more than you thought? That’s how I feel. You know?”
Joey kept a straight face. “I have no idea what that’s like.”
“You don’t?”
She rolled her eyes. “Darlo, is this the first time you’ve wondered if Blood Orphans is fucked?”
“Fucked? We’re not fucked. I was talking about my dad.”
Joey looked at him in utter amazement.
“What?” Darlo said. “Babe, we’re not. We need a vacation is all.”
“Oh. Is that all we need?”
She spoke in a tone that said, You are fucking deluded, but Darlo was inflating again. Logistics and plans.
“We need more discipline,” he said. “I have all kinds of ideas for the next record.”
“Like what?”
“A power ballad, for one.”
She blew smoke and smiled. “Like covering ‘Home Sweet Home’ is going to fucking fix anything.”
Darlo looked at their reflection in the circular chrome that lined the bar. Their faces were elongated, like the eerie masks in that stupid Kabuki porn series his dad had done called Yellow Fever. Guys marched around in those masks and cock rings in some pagoda-type house and fucked Japanese girls dressed like geishas. Not one of Dirty Darling’s bestsellers. Still, he lingered on the image, staring hard.
“Enough,” Joey said. “Let’s quit ambling and go back to my hotel. You need a fucking shower.”
As they walked, Darlo tried to keep his head clear, but the dungeon in the basement of his father’s house reared up. The dungeon and the closet full of guns, knives, cocaine. They were coming upon Museumplein again, and the sound of the protest rose up.
“I need to use your phone again,” he said.
She lugged it over and crossed her arms. “Don’t take too long. That shit is a squillion cents a minute.”
He went into a booth and punched numbers. Satellite noise thrummed in his ear. Arctic blasts over Hudson Bay. Electrons bouncing through the ionosphere. The sound of Jesse’s voice had its own tweaky comfort.
“Oh, damn!” Jesse yelled. “My nigga!”
“Yo, Adamson.”
He clued Jesse. He told his drug dealer what needed to be done. “You know where I keep all of it, right?”
“In the pool house?”
“No, man. In the closet. In the shoe box. Next to the guns.”
Some coiffed art-student type in a black turtleneck and coat knocked on the booth. He spat at the little Dutchie. Loogie congealed between them.
“Can I have one of those guns?” Jesse asked. “As payment for services rendered.”
“Not a chance,” Darlo said, “and enough with the fucking thug life. This is serious shit.”
“I could hang up,” Jesse said. “I could do that.”
Darlo growled. “Take the Bren, if you want to be a bitch about it. But not the Glock.”
“You have a Glock?”
“Dude, this isn’t a joke! They’re going to search the place.”
“And that means your house is under fucking surveillance, dude.”
More Canadian static.
“What do you expect me to do?” Jesse continued. “Flash a badge?”
Drug dealers. You’d think they’d be more resourceful.
“Wait until five in the morning,” Darlo said. “That’s in a few hours. There won’t be anyone there.”
“You bet there will.”
“And what if there is? You get caught, it’ll be like that fucking time we broke into the Sharkey house down the street. Once they see your address on your license, they’ll scatter. Your fucking dad pays their salary. Now stop being a pussy, bro, and go get my shit.”
Darlo breathed out frost and lit a cigarette. Joey sat on a bench, looking pensive — looking, Darlo thought, like she was hiding something. Fucking knew it. That bitch is full-on withholding.
“Fine,” Jesse said.
“Yeah, look, just do it and —”
Static over Iceland. Birds over Newfoundland.
“— if it, if you can’t — Jesus, what is that?”
“Bad connection. Technology, man.”
“Just try, all right? And call me when you’re in there. OK?”
Jesse moaned. Darlo couldn’t believe how difficult he was being. “In the closet. With the guns. Leave the Glock.”
“Roger that,” Jesse said. “At your service.”
“Leave the Glock. I mean it. Go.”
12
SO HOW WAS THE MEETING?” Darlo asked, handing over the phone. “With Hackney?”
Joey never thought the day would come when Darlo looked spooked, but here they were, walking toward Vondelpark, pretty sure they were going in the wrong direction from her hotel, and the drummer seemed so preoccupied and nervous she thought he’d walk right into Dutchie tram traffic. Of course, she understood that his dad’s arrest would rattle Darlo, but still, she
expected him to put on a brave face. Darlo was the heart of Blood Orphans, righteously pumping, keeping the rotting body intact. Darlo showing vulnerability, however stunted, deflated what was left of her optimism.
And he really smelled. The smell of him made Joey’s eyes water in ways good and bad.
Joey shrugged and lit one of her matches. “Fucking Hackney thinks he’s so slick.” She wasn’t going to let on, not here. “Talking loud and saying nothing.”
“What nothing did he say, though? Are they upset? Are they happy?”
“We didn’t really talk about it.”
Darlo looked skeptical. She’d blown it a little there, underplayed it.
“What do you mean, didn’t talk about it?”
“He just wanted to party.”
“With you? At breakfast?”
“I’m attractive and easy.”
“Real virtues.”
“You don’t seem to mind.”
Darlo looked at the manager, who recognized, in his bloodshot valleys, profound problems that had nothing to do with her or the band. They were the red tangled map of a deep and fermented sorrow.
“Your eyes,” she said. “Jesus, Darlo.”
“I’m having a bad fucking day, babe,” he said. “My dad’s in fucking jail and I can’t get any money. So pardon fucking me if I look a little shitty.”
She resisted taking his hand. “We can talk if you want.”
He drew back, smirking. “About fucking what, exactly?”
Joey thought of pictures of rock musicians not long before they died: Brian Jones by the pool in which he drowned, pasty-faced, wearing a shirt of American flags; Jim Morrison, pig-faced and stringy-haired in a Paris café; Janis Joplin, slouched on a velvet couch, cradling a Jack Daniel’s bottle in her arms like a baby. Darlo had the same end-of-the-line vibe, and he hadn’t been famous in the bargain. She waited for feelings of guilt, as if, in her capacity as manager, she could have alleviated this condition. But no guilt came. Only worry that Darlo would start breaking down in ways she could not predict.
If I fuck him, she thought, finally and completely, will that do the trick?
Darlo picked something out of his hair. This took a minute. Her phone rang.
“Who is it?” he asked.
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